Anthropology and Archaeology: Year In Review 2006

Sequencing projects decoded more than one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA, and a nearly complete skeleton of a baby australopithecine was described. A newly recognized pyramid in Mexico City was dated to the time of Teotihuacán. Neolithic sites yielded evidence of early dentistry and plant domestication.

In 2006 two collaborating international research teams published the first results of their attempt to decipher the nuclear genome of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal specimen that was recovered from a cave in Croatia. One team sequenced about one million base pairs of nuclear DNA; the other, an additional 65,250 base pairs. Both teams found that the genetic difference between humans and Neanderthals was less than 0.5%. The time at which Neanderthal and human DNA began to diverge was calculated to be 516,000 years and 706,000 years ago on the basis of the larger and smaller samples, respectively. The actual human-Neanderthal population split date was estimated at 370,000 years ago, from an ancestral population with an effective size of perhaps 3,000 individuals. One of the teams found possible genetic evidence for hybridization between human males and Neanderthal females. A group from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Ger., which worked with both teams, predicted that a draft of the entire nuclear genome would be completed within two years.

The most complete skeleton of an early hominin (hominid) juvenile ever recovered was described in September by a multidisciplinary international team of researchers. The specimen, which was discovered at Dikika, Eth., in 2000, was so thoroughly embedded in hard sandstone that portions of the skeleton had yet to be removed. The three-year-old female Australopithecus afarensis, named Selam, lived 3.3 million years ago, roughly 120,000 years before Lucy, the well-known adult A. afarensis that was recovered nearby at Hadar. Selam demonstrated mosaic evolution in that she combined African apelike features of the hyoid bone, scapula, finger bones, brain, face, nose, and semicircular canals with distinctly hominin traits of the dentition, legs, knees, and feet. Her lower-limb bones indicated that she walked bipedally while on the ground; however, her upper body seemed to have been adapted to life in the trees.

This fossil skull of a three-year-old female Australopithecus afarensis was found …

An international team of paleoanthropologists reassessed key morphological features and the taxonomic placement of the Toumai cranium, which had been claimed to be the earliest hominin in the fossil record. The nearly complete cranium was discovered in Chad in 2001 and was first published in 2002 as Sahelanthropus tchadensis, with an estimated age of 6 million to 7 million years. (A later study indicated the fossil was probably 6.5 million to 7.4 million years old.) In the absence of any postcranial remains, its status as a hominin was based primarily on anatomical interpretations of a small, highly worn canine tooth and cranial features that were thought to indicate an upright stance and bipedal locomotion. The new analysis concluded that—contrary to the results of several other studies— Sahelanthropus was a late Miocene ape. Among its findings were that the size and wear patterns of the canine tooth were not exceptional for a late Miocene ape and that the rear portion of the cranium and the posterior portion of the cranial base were more compatible with a chimpanzee pattern of locomotion than with a hominin pattern of upright, bipedal locomotion. A variety of taxonomic hypotheses based on the morphological examinations were proposed for Sahelanthropus. For example, Sahelanthropus might have been an early member of the gorilla clade, closely related to the chimpanzee clade, closely related to the human-chimpanzee common ancestor, or, most likely, a member of an extinct clade of African apes.

Researchers at the Broad Institute, Cambridge, Mass., investigated the relationship between genetic change and the speciation (species formation) process that produced the hominin lineage. Their results also brought into question the hominin status of Sahelanthropus. The data for the investigation consisted of about 20 million base pairs of aligned DNA sequence from humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, macaques, and spider monkeys. The complex speciation model that the researchers developed proposed an initial divergence date of about 10 million years ago between the proto-human and proto-chimpanzee lineages, followed by an extensive period of hybridization (interbreeding). The model suggested that during this period of interspecies gene flow, a third (hybrid) population likely formed and later became extinct as a distinct entity when the human and chimpanzee lineages completed their divergence less than 6.3 million years ago (and perhaps as recently as 5.4 million years ago). These dates implied that Sahelanthropus preceded the final hominin-chimpanzee divergence and that, rather than being the earliest hominin in the fossil record, it might instead have been the result of hybridization between the proto-hominin and proto-chimpanzee lineages. This postulated genetic exchange would effectively explain the combination of primitive apelike characteristics with more derived traits reminiscent of later hominins that led to the aforementioned discrepancies in the taxonomic placement of Sahelanthropus.

In the neo-Darwinian evolutionary paradigm, natural selection is considered to be the most important evolutionary force. Nevertheless, many anthropologists questioned its efficacy in contemporary human populations because of the important role of culture in shaping the adjustments humans made to changing environmental conditions. Recent genome-wide and locus-specific searches for signals of positive (directional), negative (purifying), and balancing selection in the human lineage over the past 200,000 years overwhelmingly agreed in showing that natural selection had occurred in Homo sapiens from its inception to the present. In one study a team of researchers from the University of Chicago produced a map of positive selection in the human genome based on data from people of African, East Asian, and western European ancestry. The researchers identified more than 700 genetic regions of the genome that had been reshaped by natural selection within the past 5,000 to 15,000 years. These still-incomplete selective sweeps provided information about the adaptation of modern humans to differing environmental conditions. Among the genes with strong signals of natural selection were loci that involved reproduction, metabolism (carbohydrate, lipid, and phosphate), vitamin transport, skin pigmentation, bone morphogenesis, hair formation and patterning, brain function, taste, olfaction, digestion, and parts of the electron-transport chain associated with pharmaceutical agent metabolism and salt-sensitive hypertension. In East Asians especially strong signals of positive selection were found to be associated with carbohydrate and alcohol metabolism. The average date for the statistically significant selection signals in the East Asian populations was 6,600 years ago, which suggested the possibility that these genetic changes marked genetic adaptations to the Neolithic revolution as East Asians switched to a diet based on domesticated rice. In an even larger study, an interdisciplinary team from the University of California, Irvine, used 1.6 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms. The team detected approximately 1,800 genes that exhibited the architecture of natural selection, with most of the selective events having occurred in the past 10,000–40,000 years. Several predominant biological themes consistently surfaced in selected alleles, including host-pathogen interactions, reproduction, DNA metabolism, protein metabolism, cell-cycle control, and neuronal function. The researchers speculated that gene-culture interactions directly or indirectly shaped the genome of humans as they spread throughout the globe and began regional shifts from hunter-gatherer to agrarian subsistence strategies. The inescapable conclusion drawn from these and other surveys was that H. sapiens was still evolving biologically, especially in the realms of reproduction, metabolism, chemosensation (smell and taste), and defense against novel pathogens.

Archaeology

Eastern Hemisphere

Natural disaster and war took their toll on archaeological sites in 2006. An earthquake that rocked Indonesia in May damaged the 10th-century Hindu complex of Prambanan. In continued unrest in Iraq, the 1,000-year-old minaret of Ana, about 320 km (200 mi) west of Baghdad, was blown up, and sites that included the 4,000-year-old cities of Isin and Larsa were looted. In southern Lebanon, Tyre, Baalbek, Chemaa, and other sites sustained damage during fighting between Israel forces and Hezbollah militants in July and August.

The discovery of a collection of 32 flints dated to 700,000 years ago near Pakefield, Eng., on the North Sea coast pushed back the date for the earliest-known human arrival in the British Isles by some 200,000 years. The tools were attributed to a relative of the archaic human species Homo heidelbergensis and attested a relatively rapid northern expansion of early humans after their arrival in southern Europe.

A 5,000–6,000-year-old settlement associated with the Henge people was found at a quarry site near Milfield, Eng. A number of buildings were found—including three from the early Neolithic (about 4000 bc) and three from the late Neolithic, about a millennium later—along with pieces of cooking pots, flint tools, and a grindstone. Although numerous well-known ritual centres, including Woodhenge and Stonehenge, had been attributed to the Henge people, their dwellings had remained largely unknown.

Evidence of early jewelry making was pushed back to 100,000 years ago with the identification of perforated beadlike shells of a species of sea snail called Nassarius gibbosulus from collections held by the Natural History Museum in London and the Museum of Man in Paris. The shells—one unearthed at Oued Djebbana in Algeria and two at Skhul in Israel—were described in a study by Marian Vanhaeren of University College London and colleagues. Previously, the oldest-known jewelry had consisted of snail shells described in 2004 from a find at Blombos Cave, a 75,000-year-old site on the South African coast.

An unfinished rock-cut chamber that was uncovered near the tomb of Tutankhamen was initially heralded as the first tomb to be found in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings since the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. The unfinished chamber, which contained seven coffins, was discovered by Otto Schaden and a team from the University of Memphis, Tenn. No mummies were found, however, and since the coffins contained only mummification materials, many Egyptologists believed that the “new tomb” was simply an embalming chamber or supply room.

The well-preserved remains of the oldest-known seafaring vessels, together with boxes that may have held cargo, were found in a complex of 4,000-year-old rock-cut caves on the Red Sea at Wadi Gawasis, Egypt. According to site excavators Kathryn Bard of Boston University and Rodolfo Fattovich of the University of Naples l’Orientale, most of the nautical remains—mortise-and-tenon joined cedar planks, rigging, and a number of stone anchors—dated to the Middle Kingdom (about 1938–1630 bc). Two steering-oar blades recovered in the excavation, however, were dated to the New Kingdom, and the excavators speculated that they could be from ships that had plied the Red Sea as part of the legendary expedition of Queen Hatshepsut (ruled about 1472–58 bc) to the ancient land of Punt.

A collection of figs found within the ruins of an 11,400-year-old house at the Neolithic village site Gilgal I in Israel’s Jordan River valley was cited by Mordechai Kislev of Bar-llan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, and colleagues as evidence of one of the earliest-known forms of plant domestication. According to the researchers, the nine whole figs and hundreds of fig fragments were of parthenocarpic, or self-pollinating, specimens, which could have been propagated only with human intervention. Domestication was considered a stage of agricultural development that followed cultivation and entailed the favouring of plant species with more desirable characteristics.

Five human skulls with faces sculpted in clay were found at the Neolithic site of Tell Aswad, 35 km (22 mi) east of Damascus, and excavated by a French-Syrian team led by Danielle Stordeur of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, and Bassam Jamous, head of antiquities for Syria’s National Museum in Damascus. The skulls, which were found beneath the remains of an infant, had been buried some 9,500 years ago, probably in honour of an important individual.

The mercantile wealth of the Thracians—who flourished in the region occupied by present-day Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, and northern Greece from about 4000 bc until their conquest by the Romans in ad 46—was further manifested by the discovery of two richly appointed tombs in Bulgaria, according to archaeologist Martin Hristov of the National Museum of History in Sofia. At one of the sites, near Zlatinitsa, Bulg., Hristov and his team unearthed what was believed to be the burial of a 4th-century bc Thracian king. He had been buried with two horses and a dog, a golden crown, and a suit of armour incised with scenes from Greek mythology.

The discovery of 2,500-year-old mummified remains of a Scythian warrior in the snow-capped Altai Mountains of Inner Mongolia was reported by Hermann Parzinger, president of the German Archaeological Institute, which excavated the site. Tattooed and clad in a beaver-skin coat and felt hat, the blond warrior was interred with two horses, weapons, and vessels made of wood, animal horn, and clay. Prior to the discovery, the Scythians had been known only on the Russian side of the mountain chain.

In Afghanistan a cluster of seven Buddhist caves carved into cliffs that overlooked the upper reaches of the Band-e-Amir River was found by Takashi Irisawa and a team from Japan’s Ryukoku University. Located 120 km (75 mi) west of the Bamian valley—where in March 2001 the Taliban had destroyed two colossal 1,500-year-old Buddha statues—the caves dated to the 8th century ad and marked the westernmost expansion of Buddhism in pre-Islamic Central Asia.

Dentists at Mehrgarh, a Neolithic site located in Balochistan province, Pakistan, had a thriving practice some 7,500 to 9,000 years ago. According to Roberto Macchiarelli of the Université de Poitiers, France, and his team, 11 teeth recovered from a graveyard had been drilled, including one tooth that showed evidence of a procedure for hollowing out a deep cavity. Until the discovery, the earliest-known evidence of dental work was from a cemetery dated to the 4th–3rd millennium bc in Denmark.

A 7,000-year-old sacrificial altar was unearthed at Anbian in Hunan province, China, by He Gang and a team from the Hunan Institute of Archaeology. The researchers recovered the bones of deer, pigs, cattle, bears, elephants, and rhinoceroses that had been deposited in 39 pits at the 1,000-sq-m (11,000-sq-ft) site.

Western Hemisphere

Archaeological discovery continued at an unabated pace in 2006, helping to throw light on mysteries of the past. Roughly 12,000 years ago the mammoth and wild horse became extinct in the area that is now Alaska and the Yukon Territory. This occurred around the time that humans from Asia first appeared in the region, so one possible explanation had been that the newly arrived humans hunted the large Ice Age animals to extinction. Research published by R. Dale Guthrie of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks indicated that although humans may have contributed to the extinction of the animals, the real culprit was a shift in climate. He studied the radiocarbon dates of 600 bones from mammoths and other mammals of the region from that time. The study showed that bison and elk were the most abundant human prey, but those species did not become extinct. He also studied pollen and other plant records and determined that as the climate became warmer and wetter, short grasses that were ideal for the now-extinct Ice Age large mammals gave way to tall grass and bushes. Bison and elk thrived on the new forage; the mammoth and wild horse did not.

Inscriptions of 62 signs on a block of stone that was found in debris near the Olmec centre at San Lorenzo in Veracruz state, Mex., were identified as the earliest known Mesoamerican writing in a report by María del Carmen Rodríguez, Ponciano Ortíz, and colleagues. The inscribed 12-kg (26-lb) stone, called the Cascajal block, was dated to about 900 bc—some 400 years earlier than the oldest Mesoamerican writing previously known—and was attributed to the Olmec culture, which flourished along the Gulf of Mexico in the 1st millennium bc.

Two surprising archaeological findings in Mexico City were announced during the year. In April archaeologist Jesús Sánchez and colleagues reported on their work in identifying a huge pyramid that was buried under a hill that overlooked a poor neighbourhood at the outskirts of the city. They determined that the pyramid was built between ad 400 and 500 by people related to those who constructed the well-known pyramids at the nearby ancient city of Teotihuacán. The newly discovered pyramid was 150 m (492 ft) square and stood about 18 m (60 ft) high. On one side of the pyramid, the excavators discovered a small temple with holes in the walls for offerings. In November archaeologists headed by Eduardo Matos unveiled an excavated monolith that was 4 m (13 ft) high and bore a representation of Tlaltecuhtli, the fearsome Aztec god of the earth. The stone slab came to light in October during minor work at the foot of the western face of Templo Mayor, the Aztec temple pyramid discovered in 1978 by utility workers as they dug near Mexico City’s main square. Although excavations around and under the monolith were continuing, the archaeologists believed that the site of the stone might be where the Aztecs buried the cremated remains of their rulers. The god on the monolith holds a rabbit and 10 dots in her right claw, which was understood to signify the death year of Ahuitzotl (ruled 1486–1502), one of the greatest of the Aztec emperors.

An Aztec stone slab found at Templo Mayor in Mexico City depicts Tlaltecuhtli, god of the earth, as …

AP

The burials of 180 African slaves were excavated from a colonial graveyard next to a church in Campeche state in southeastern Mexico. The cemetery was used from about 1550 to the late 1600s. Some of the skeletons had upper incisor teeth that had been filed at an angle, a distinctive dental mutilation commonplace in West Africa five centuries ago. The find was the earliest documentation of the African diaspora in the New World.

Anthropologist Michael Kolb of Northern Illinois University studied a network of temples that ancient Hawaiians built on the island of Maui. Many of the temples were built into the face of cliffs. The most elaborate boasted stepped platforms, oracle towers, and sacred enclosures. He used a series of more than 90 radiocarbon dates of charcoal samples from scorched soil beneath 41 Maui temples to show that the earliest temples were built in the 13th century, more than 300 years earlier than previously thought. The findings showed that the Hawaiians built the temples over more than five centuries with four peak periods of construction that seemed to coincide with periods of major social and political change.

Archaeologist William Saturno of Harvard University discovered the earliest known Maya mural in a buried room at a little-known Maya centre at San Bartolo, Guat., in 2001, but the final, west wall of the mural was uncovered only in late 2005. The painting, measuring 9.1 × 0.9 m (30 × 1 ft) and dating to about 100 bc, depicts the birth of the cosmos and the divine right of Maya kings. One scene of the mural shows the son of the maize god—the patron of rulers—floating along with a pair of birds attached to his woven hunting basket. He is engaged in ceremonial bloodletting and offers a sacrifice to two cosmic trees. A second scene shows an actual royal coronation. West of the San Bartolo pyramid with the mural room, Guatemalan archaeologist Mónica Pellecer Alecio found the oldest known Maya burial, dating to about 150 bc.

The Inca of the 15th-century Andes used knotted strings, called quipu, spun from alpaca or llama wool or cotton, as a form of record keeping. The quipu keepers would use sequences of knots and colours to record state administrative records. Many quipus have knots that are arranged in a decimal system to represent numbers, but it was not clear what other information they might contain; quipus had long been one of the great mysteries of archaeology. Anthropologist Gary Urton and mathematician Carrie Brezine of Harvard University analyzed a number of related quipus and announced that they had identified a sequence of knots that was a unique signifier. They believed that the knot sequence might be a place name but said it might also be the name of the person who made the quipu, a designation of time, or the subject matter of the string.

Archaeologists discovered a large filled-in well within the walls of the original fort of the Jamestown colony in Virginia. It was perhaps the well that Capt. John Smith, leader of the colony, ordered to be built in 1609. The well, 1.8 m (6 ft) square and 6.1 m (20 ft) deep, was several times larger than other wells known from that time and was hidden beneath the foundations of a brick fireplace that was part of a 1617 addition to a house built in 1611. William Kelso, the director of the Jamestown archaeological project, believed that the well was in the shape of a square rather than a circle because it was built by men with mining experience. In the ground below the water table were a variety of well-preserved objects, including a child’s leather shoe, surgical implements, a pistol, and a halberd. The fill above the water table contained a German jug that dated to 1604, large quantities of bones from butchered animals, large oyster shells, and fish bones, including those from Atlantic sturgeon. An analysis of the shells and fish bones together with plant matter found in the well was expected to contribute to an understanding of the ecology of Chesapeake Bay at the time of the first European settlement.